Have you ever wanted to open a url from the command line on OS X? Turns out open can do many cool things like that.

open -a ‘google chrome’ ‘http://www.scottcsims.com’

open -a Firefox.app http://www.scottcsims.com

Sometimes a parallel Selenium run might get out of control and you need to close all your browsers, try this one from the command line:

killall firefox

Yes, I know killall is a very old Unix command, but I didn’t know that I could pass it an application name that a OS X has bound to an executable.

killall firefox-bin
orkillall firefox

I like the -a and -e options for open.

Usage: open [-e] [-t] [-f] [-W] [-R] [-n] [-g] [-h] [-b ] [-a ] [filenames] [--args arguments]
Help: Open opens files from a shell.
By default, opens each file using the default application for that file.
If the file is in the form of a URL, the file will be opened as a URL.
Options:
-a Opens with the specified application.
-b Opens with the specified application bundle identifier.
-e Opens with TextEdit.
-t Opens with default text editor.
-f Reads input from standard input and opens with TextEdit.
-F --fresh Launches the app fresh, that is, without restoring windows. Saved persistent state is lost, excluding Untitled documents.
-R, --reveal Selects in the Finder instead of opening.
-W, --wait-apps Blocks until the used applications are closed (even if they were already running).
--args All remaining arguments are passed in argv to the application's main() function instead of opened.
-n, --new Open a new instance of the application even if one is already running.
-j, --hide Launches the app hidden.
-g, --background Does not bring the application to the foreground.
-h, --header Searches header file locations for headers matching the given filenames, and opens them.

I had a great time attending the Test Automation Bazaar in Austin. Alister Scott put on a contest to see who could write a program to win Minesweeper. After checking out what was required, I started coding the Minesweeper robot. Before I noticed, I had spent hours coding tests and methods for the robot. It was one of the most addictive and exciting code I had written. I spent about 3 days coding along to get something to win on basic and intermediate level. I spent hours trying to win on advanced.

I ended up winning the Minesweeper Challenge! I encourage everyone to take a look at Alister’s code. Alister wrote some of the best cukes and examples I have seen. I was very impressed by the time he put into writing unit tests that work on logic only, taking the browser out of the mix. Thanks Alister for putting on the contest. If you wish to see what 3 days of coding gets you in a mine sweeper robot you can checkout my code on github. As I mentioned before I got really engaged with writing this code. I could have spent weeks tuning and polishing it. I did have a chance to refractor the code to use Nokogiri instead of the find all elements selenium method to check the game state. I believe that this might have actually slowed it down.

Sadly to say, I had to withdraw from polishing and tuning the code. If you want to run my robot checkout the code and run the test “Minesweeper should win” in this file.

What should you expect SeleniumFury to find on a page for you? Take a look behind the curtains at the PageParser class on git hub.
You will find that I am using Nokogiri xml parser to find elements and you will see this list of html elements that I am looking for.

For more complex UI elements like jquery select menus, I usually will define the class and write a unit test for the actions that can be done on the component.
You can use the page method on PageObject to define a subpage or page component like this.

Checkout Selenium Fury on relishapp.com. I found the site when I was searching for Rspec2 documentation. The site organizes your cucumber features into a really nice presentation so that your features can be consumed as documentation. It has been a great tool for learning more about Rspec 2. To illustrate the difference this is what it is like to view Features on github and here is the same feature on rellishapp.

The latest release of Selenium Fury is ready for your install. Checkout the new cucumber features at the project home https://github.com/scottcsims/SeleniumFury. This version includes extended page element recognition, custom generators, and the git hub project includes support for bundler and rvm.

I have been working on converting our page object factory to open source for a few weeks. Now it is time to launch the HomeAway sponsored open source project under the Apache 2.0 license. It is a furiously quick way to implement test automation. I am planning to add more configuration options in the future.

This project started when I had to test a page with 300+ check boxes and I did not want to enter them by hand. I used the page object generator to build a page of ruby variables with Selenium locators. Everything was great until some number of the check boxes changed their ids and my tests started failing. I needed a quick way to find out how many changed so I could update the locators by hand or regenerate the page. This is where the validators came in. I used Ruby’s support of reflection to open a class, navigate to the url of the page and use Selenium to validate the locators and return a list of missing locators on the page. It worked perfectly for my page of 300+ check boxes. I had over 40 that changed I quickly regenerated the page.

I wanted to test an error message in my class that processes test results and sends them to Rally. The problem was that I did not want to actually create a rally object and run the method to parse the results, just to test the error message.
This is what my class looks like.

it "should raise an exception if there are not test case results" do
RallyUtils.stub!(:new).and_return(nil)
automation_run=AutomationRun.new
automation_run.should_receive(:push_test_case_results).and_return([])
begin
automation_run.send_results_to_rally
rescue Exception=>e
end
e.message.should == "Test Case Results Were Not Parsed Correctly"
end

We use a rspec stub to intercept the new call to the RallyUtils class and return nil. We could have also returned a mock object if we wanted to execute a call on the rally class. Now we are not creating a connection to Rally

Now it is time to new up or AutomationRun class and setup our mock expectation to skip running the real push_test_case_results method.

automation_run.should_receive tells us to intercept the symbol or method push_test_case_results

and_return([]) will just return an empty array

We setup a begin rescue block to capture the Exception object returned by our expected error message

Now we call send_results_to_rally to get our error message

Lastly we verify that the message attribute for our error is Test Case Results Were Not Parsed Correctly

So that is it, I created a partial mock in that we are using a real automation run object but we stubbed out one of the methods. We also stubbed out the new call to rally so we don’t create a connection. Now I can focus my test on exactly the function I wanted to test, the error message.

Deep test allows you to run ruby rspec tests in parallel by providing a spec task that you include in your rake file. The 2.0 prerelease version of deep tests offers support for rspec 1.1.12. You can install it buy running: gem install deep_test_pre. Require it in your rake file like this:

gem “deep_test_pre”, “=2.0”

require “deep_test”

gem “deep_test_pre”, “=2.0”
require “deep_test”

There currently is a bug that occurs if you run Test::Unit tests with the deep test spec runner. The tests will all run twice but are reported once.